A Christmas Career Carol, The Pitfalls of Portraying the Workplace as ‘Fun’

Guest post by Dr Helmut Schuster and Dr David Oxley authors of A Career Carol: A Tale of Professional Nightmares and How to Navigate Them Unmasking Authenticity: The Pitfalls of Portraying the Workplace as ‘Fun’

Over the past several years, companies have rushed to copy design concepts championed by WeWork and Palantir. Budgets were secured to ‘transform’ offices into more social places, with serendipitous collaboration hubs, and relaxation pods. While the pandemic may have slowed some of this, there remains a belief that ‘cool’ office space may be the key to attract great talent.

A short tale, drawing on the Career Carol book

Causation versus correlation

There is a danger of this becoming another fad. This isn’t an unusual thing. Over the past 50 years, organizations have fallen in and out of love with different things, like how we dress, measuring the time it takes to do things, and publishing mission & values statements.

It’s tempting in a busy world to look for hacks and shortcuts that can help us simplify complex challenges. The problem becomes when we confuse their convenience for something more meaningful.

Focusing on substance over form

So, at what point does striving to create a practical but appealing work environment run the risk of inauthenticity? Quite simply when it is used to compensate for a lack of genuine substance.

What surprises us about some justifications for ping pong tables and beanbags, is the suggestion that they will help organizations attract millennial and GenZ talent. When we challenge this, we are often confronted with justifications along the Bandwagon Fallacy spectrum.

The authenticity pyramid: a visualization

A much more effective way to appraise investments in a companies’ employment proposition is to remember there is a clear hierarchy in what matters. Think of this like a pyramid of glasses stacked, sequentially, on top of one another – overfilling one cup doesn’t help you with the others:

1. The basics: pay, security, basic respectability.
2. The conditions: the office, the benefits.
3. The unwritten rules: degrees of freedom, self-expression, what is acceptable behavior.
4. The work itself: is it engaging, challenging, am I encouraged, nurtured
5. Co-workers: are they cool or jerks
6. The future: can I go further, what is the ceiling?
7. The leadership: do they walk the talk, do I trust them, do I respect them?
8. A higher purpose: do I feel good about what we do, is it something I’m proud of.

In our experience, companies who over-emphasize one of these at the expense of the others tend to get counterproductive outcomes. Smart talent can smell inauthenticity and see it as attempted deception. This was very apparent in research for our book, the belief that companies were being disingenuous and manipulative was one of the major drivers for Millennial and GenZ talent to make a change. Their number one concern was to find a job that gave them the best possible opportunity to experience the higher levels of fulfillment available in those organizations with authentic substance…. even if it meant their table tennis games suffered.

A Career Carol: A Tale of Professional Nightmares and How to Navigate Them by Dr Helmut Schuster and Dr David Oxley is published on October 13 by Austin Macauley Publishers and is available on Amazon. 

Drs Schuster & Oxley, longtime friends and work colleagues launch the first book in the Shey Sinope saga on October 13^th.They bring their considerable experience as energy executives, HR leaders, and social scientists to successfully navigating the four big existential crisis we are all likely to face across a 40-year working lifetime. 

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